Mae West

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Mae West was a legendary actress who taught Americans to smile about sex.

She was an original: the ultimate bosomy, blond sex symbol whose style — a silken walk, suggestive less of sex than of the meshing of superbly machined parts — was often imitated but never equaled.

Paramount Pictures, then teetering on the brink of insolvency, offered her $5,000 a week to start her film career in "Night After Night" (1932) with George Raft.

Her total list of film credits was an even dozen, a remarkably small number. No one else had ever established so secure a place in film history on the basis of so few roles, but then no other woman had become a sex symbol after making her screen debut at 39, either.

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Two thoughts about Mae West

“

I like her quick wit and her dance ability

”— Joanne DeFeo, August 19, 2014 at 11:02 a.m.
“

Recently on Jeopardy, one of the questions had to do with a life jacket named for a movie star. None of the contestants could name Mae West. I felt very smug (as one always does when one knows the answer and the TV contestants don't). And I remembered Mae. She was one of the most fascinating interviews of my career, and I got to interview her twice.

The first time was during my tenure as editor of Hollywood magazine. It was a bio piece meant to introduce Mae to a whole new generation of moviegoers. She (and Raquel Welch) was starring in a film based on Gore Vidal's book, Myra Breckinridge, about a sex change operation. The film was pretty stinko (how's that for a review?) but Mae was wonderful. Just not in that film, however. Mae enjoyed a very long and enormously successful career. In 1935 she was the second highest paid person in the United States, second only to William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper tycoon.

Mae West was basically a writer. The acting was secondary. (She started out as a child acrobat.) She wrote her own screenplays and for Broadway. The greatest character Mae created was herself. Do any of you remember the scenes in "My Little Chickadee" with W. C. Fields where they are on a train and she avoids consummating the relationship by using a goat (among other distractions)? According to Mae, that really was the way she avoided intimacy with her real husband whom she had secretly married as a teenager to help her fend off unwanted attentions of other actors in the troop. Then she got her agent to send the poor guy off on another circuit so they never got together. It was hilarious the way she told (and wrote) it.

The second time I interviewed Mae (both were in the luxury apartment building she owned on Ravenswood in Hollywood) I was founding editor of a women's health magazine titled Feminine Fitness. (Terrible title, not my choice.) By this time Mae was 86 years old. One of her "butlers" served us carrot cake in the penthouse where Mae made her abode. Everything in the apartment was white, including the baby grand piano. But I noticed that all was a bit dusty and the white roses in the crystal vase were made of plastic.

I had asked Mae to demonstrate her fitness regime. She showed me how she twisted a towel of prevent arm flaps. And described various moves she made in bed to keep fit.In another demonstration aimed at keeping her bosom alert, she placed the webs of her thumbs together and pushed. Those bosoms leaped six inches into the air! It was astonishing.

"Come on, honey, you try it," she said.

I stood up, pressed the webs of my thumbs together and pushed. Nothing happened. I pushed again. Ditto.

"Mae, they're not moving," I said. "They're just staring at the floor."

""That's all right, dearie," Mae said in her famous suggestive cadence. "At least they're not cross-eyed."

”— Bonnie Rogers, November 23, 2015 at 12:54 a.m.

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